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Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IMPULS team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • [The most surprising thing was] Definitely that we all could build up the confidence in areas we didn’t feel confident in so quickly. The ability to be told “go for it, here is the task” so early on truly wasn’t anticipated and then building each other’s confidence and working collaboratively was something I didn’t expect so soon.
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Curiosity, patience, and grit! You also need to be willing to accept that you don’t have all the answers, and you will need to change your perceptions based on what you observe!
  • [student: To be an astronomer,] I think it is important to have perseverance, confidence, and adaptability.
  • For me, “real astronomy” was rolling up my sleeves and wrestling with the data. Sitting with the team and Luisa as she walked through the light-curve pipelines, typing in commands, and troubleshooting in real time. That was when I felt like a genuine researcher. It was in the back-and-forth of asking “Why is this flux point off?” and watching her reproduce the exact steps on her screen. That hands-on, collaborative number crunching! The collective “aha!” when a curve suddenly made sense. That's real astronomy.
  • [student:] I was very surprised to see how vast the data and images were from different telescopes. I’m not totally sure what I expected but all of the data sets, initially before editing, look very different from one another but in the end all produce (sometimes) similar rotation periods.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS